JW Anderson Gives Young Photographers a Future

As someone who won her career in a competition—the Vogue Talent Contest in British Vogue, many years ago—I’m all for open-call contests for newcomers. So is Jonathan Anderson of JW Anderson, who hasn’t forgotten that he got one of his early-start boosts as a designer from the NewGen sponsorship scheme in London in 2011. Seven years on, that memory was part of his motivation in launching the JW Anderson Your Picture/Our Future search: to galvanize a new generation of unpublished photographers and image-makers aged 18-30. “I felt as if we were given the chance,” he stated, at the launch. “It felt right to give somebody else that opportunity.” The prize is a significant professional break: a commission to shoot the brand’s Spring 2019 campaign and £5,000.

The winner’s reveal was on his Instagram earlier today, but after last night’s exhibition of the 50 short-listed talents at 13 Floral Street in London, and a long deliberation of the jury, three were chosen: Julie Greve from the U.K., Yelena Beletskaya from Russia, and Simons Finnerty from the U.S. “Seeing all this talent come together made it impossible to choose one winner,” reads the caption. “As such, we will have three photographers that will work on the same brief and campaign coming to you next summer.”

You could see why. Pacing around a party thronged by some of the hopefuls who’d been able to travel, Anderson said, “It’s been kind of amazing. We had nearly 2,000 entries from all across the world: Japan, China, Argentina, Russia, Canada, the USA, everywhere.” The diversity of imagery, viewpoints, and techniques—intense studies of teenage life, portraiture, reportage, raw documentary, manipulated digital collages—was striking. “It’s a really good split between fashion imagery and street imagery, but you can see a zeitgeist here, and how so many people start taking pictures of their friends and families.”

Anderson paused in front of Simons Finnerty’s series of self-revealing photographs of himself, in braids, with members of his family. “He used it as an idea of therapy. Someone out there in the middle of America—it’s so fantastic.” Julie Greve submitted her series of groups of girls in the woods and countryside, all of them model hopefuls she found on the internet, but shot naturalistically in their own clothes. Yelena Beletskaya worked with dramatic, enigmatic, black-and-white collages of found images and her own silhouetted portraiture.

The three go forward through the live challenge of producing work with Anderson, his stylist Benjamin Bruno, and the JW Anderson advertising and image team M/M. But playing the game is certain to prove a springboard and encouragement for plenty more of the applicants—that’s the nature of these contests. One is Toby Ziff, who drew local awe from Londoners for his work shooting scenes of the hilariously appalling reality of weekend nightlife revelers on the Underground. Aaron Laserna’s arresting entries, shot in Baltimore, showed him as a risk-taking proto-photojournalist with his powerful portrait of a drug dealer, contrasted with a tender shot of a young boy from the same neighborhood.

And then there was the youngest on the scene: 18-year-old Diego Holmes-Bonilla, who had flown to London from Arlington, Virginia accompanied by his mom. He had taken a teen-to-teen-boy series capturing stuff he wanted to say about the friends he’s known since childhood, looking tough but peering inside their fragile hearts. “They’re people dear to me,” he said. He may not have taken home the prize tonight, but unmistakably, that’s a future in the making.